Over the last 10 days I’ve played 3 Secrets of Strixhaven (SOS) drafts using Untapped.gg’s Draftsmith. The experience has been much more positive than I remembered from the drafts I had played sporadically in the past. This time I knew that Boros, Orzhov, and Golgari (or maybe I should say Lorehold, Silverquill, and Witherbloom) are the winning decks, and I had looked over the tier list a little. Still, I have to say the guidance Draftsmith adds is crucial: not just for picking cards, but also for deciding which 40 cards will make it into the deck. I think what I still struggle with most is, first, staying open to changing colors after the first few picks and, above all, building the deck. In the next drafts I play, I’ll turn Draftsmith off while building the deck and only turn it back on afterwards to see whether what I built is very far from the recommendation.
Let’s take a closer look at the 3 drafts:
I guess I’m pretty lucky in the draft because I manage to build a white-black deck. Silverquill is one of SOS’s archetypes. The strategy for this archetype is called Repartee Aggro. Repartee is a mechanic where “things happen” when you play instants and sorceries on creatures. The strategy is clear: play some small creatures, pump them, and attack!
I win the first game against Simic/Quandrix with relative ease. The second one goes very long (16 turns!), and that plays in favor of my Golgari/Witherbloom opponent, whose strategy is gaining life and creating lots of small creatures. In the third game I’m surprised by an opponent with a 4-color deck that ramps, gets 4 different basic lands by turn three, and has answers for everything! In the fourth match I face another opponent playing four colors, but I end up winning a more or less even game. The fifth match is a mirror where my opponent is on the play and runs me over in 5 turns. So, third loss and time to go home!
This time the draft leads me toward Witherbloom, where the recommended strategy is called Lifegain Swarm: that is, gaining life by creating lots of small creatures. Still, I think some of the green cards I pick, like Emil, Vastlands Roamer or Additive Evolution , are more typical of the Quandrix deck… In any case, without going into too much detail, I manage to get 3 copies of Bogwater Lumaret , which is a key piece of the strategy, plus a few removal pieces, so the deck ends up being quite functional and I get a 50% win rate, which isn’t bad!
In this draft I’m offered good options in white, black, and red… and that makes me uneasy. In Limited I’m always afraid that if I branch out into more than two colors I won’t have enough cards to make a decent deck if the 3-color option doesn’t work out and I have to stay with two. In the end, though, with Draftsmith’s help I end up building another Orzhov/Silverquill deck, better than the one I built in the first draft, with 4 copies of Dig Site Inventory .
In a game from an earlier draft I realized how powerful Snooping Page is in this deck. When you grow it, it becomes unblockable and even draws cards!
I enjoyed this draft much more now that I had a bit more experience, and I’m starting to understand why people say Limited is the most fun format. In the end I managed to get above a 50% win rate with a 4-3, which maybe could’ve even been a 5-3 if I hadn’t made the mistake of declaring a suicidal attack that left me completely exposed in the final game, with a Restoration Seminar in hand that I could have played the following turn and that might have led me to victory…
